so ive been doing CW practice for about 3 months now and im stuck somewhere around 8-9wpm and its driving me crazy. when i first started i was making really fast progress, went from zero to 5wpm in like 2 weeks with the Koch method and just hammering away at the LCWO site every night. but now it feels like im hitting a wall and cant seem to push past that 8-9wpm range no matter what i do.

my routine right now is about 20-30 minutes a day using the LCWO random character trainer. i know people say you should listen to actual QSOs too but honestly at my speed i can only pick out maybe one word every few seconds and it gets frustrating. im wondering if i should just push the character speed up even if i cant copy everything - ive heard some people do Farnsworth spacing where the characters are fast but there's extra space between them, and then you narrow the spacing over time. tried it briefly but not sure if im doing it right.

curious how long it actually took people here to get to 20wpm, like real talk not the optimistic stuff you read in the handbooks. and is there some trick to getting unstuck from that 8-10wpm plateau because it feels like a brick wall right now.

oh man the 8-10wpm wall is SO real, i think almost everyone hits it. what happens is your brain kind of shifts gears around there - below that speed you're still mentally spelling out letters but to go faster you have to start hearing whole words and common letter combinations as sounds, not individual characters. it's a different kind of listening and it doesn't happen overnight.

what finally broke me through was two things. first i stopped doing random characters and started using the most common english words trainer - just 100 or 200 of the most used words over and over until they burned into my brain as single sounds. "the" and "and" and "for" just become one thing you recognize instantly. second thing was i started actually calling CQ on 40m at like 12wpm and just forcing myself into real QSOs even when i had to ask for lots of repeats. the pressure of a real contact does something to your brain that no trainer can replicate.

took me maybe 8 months to get solid at 20wpm but i wasnt super consistent about practice. if youre doing 30 min every day you might get there faster. dont give up on it, it really does click eventually.

yeah the farnsworth thing is worth sticking with. i was skeptical too but i kept my character speed at 20wpm the whole time and just adjusted the spacing down slowly over weeks. honestly just trust the process and dont drop the character speed, thats the main thing people mess up with that method.